Technical Field
The technical field generally relates to power management within information technology (IT) environments, and more particularly, to systems and methods for managing and protecting virtualized assets.
Background Discussion
The widespread adoption of virtualization technologies has increased the necessity of protecting critical physical assets (e.g., servers) which are responsible for hosting virtualized assets such as virtual machines. For example, a server may host multiple virtual machines and may be attached to one or more uninterruptable power supplies (UPSs) to insure continuous operation. In the event of a power failure, a UPS may continue to power the server for some period of time. However, during a power failure it may be necessary to gracefully power-down the server in order to maintain the integrity of one or more virtual machines hosted on the server.
Traditional power management and monitoring of information technology (IT) assets includes specialized software running on one or more servers. The specialized software may be configured to communicate with one or more UPSs (e.g., via a network) and process UPS events. For example, in the event of a power outage the specialized software may receive a UPS event indicating backup power is being supplied via the UPS. Additional events from the UPS may provide indications of power values including current load, remaining power, and estimated amount of power remaining. In some circumstances the specialized software may determine a shutdown of IT assets is appropriate. In these circumstances, the specialized software may execute shutdown commands (e.g., remote procedures) on one or more servers associated with a UPS that has indicated a fault. The one or more servers may perform an orderly shutdown of hosted virtual machines prior to turning off.